Deprecated proc and C debugging

September 26, 2005

While trying to debug Hula on FreeBSD I found that the normal GNU C debugging tools (gdb, truss, ktrace) fail since /proc is no longer on the filesystem, in FreeBSD 6.0, for them to write to. It was deprecated as a security concern and functionality moved to sysctl for 5.x, but for 6.x it’s just gone. I’m looking for a long term solution, but short term was just to recreate /proc on the server and mount it. One liner coming up:

echo "proc /proc procfs rw 0 0" >> /etc/fstab; mount /proc

Since Linux still uses /proc I assume the functionality of sysctl would cover these tools to debug C code somehow and redirect stdin, but I don’t know how. Any FreeBSD C hackers out there with a hint?